But by 2009-10, residential property owners were shouldering much more of the burden - 72 percent of property taxes - while businesses were shouldering much less of the burden - just 28 percent, according to the report (which you can read the whole report here: SystemFailureFinalReportMay2010.)

In virtually every county, commercial property is paying a far smaller share of the property tax since Proposition 13 passed in 1978, it says, and "commercial property is able to exploit huge loopholes in the law to avoid reassessment upon a change in ownership as required by current state law."

To which a different tax advocacy group says, "pshaw." More on that in a minute.

...AND STATISTICS

The CTRA based its report "in part on newly-discovered county survey data reported over many years to the Board of Equalization (BOE) which to our knowledge has never before been examined and utilized, and in part on data provided by county assessors, some of whom have substantial records going back in time," it says.

Instead of counting only owner-occupied housing in its residential numbers, it counted all residential housing - even rentals, on the logic that the renters were paying the property taxes anyway, albeit built in to the price of their rents.

"Previous efforts to assess this shift have either used statewide aggregated data, or have only examined homeowner property which is owner-occupied and qualifies for a homeowner exemption. We, on the other hand, used the shift between all residential versus non-residential property, including residential property both owned and rented. Residential rental property rolls include a substantial number of single-family homes and condominiums without homeowners' exemptions, as well as multi-family rental housing.

"Business groups consistently group all property without a homeowners' exemption as commercial, since those are classified as rentals. However, there are a large number of single-family homes and condominiums without homeowners' exemptions, as well as multi-family housing. The distinction we use is between residential property and all other."

A DIFFERENT VIEW

And that's the biggest problem that the conservative California Taxpayers' Association has with the report -which it says should have been printed on Swiss cheese. Prop. 13 is working well for homeowners and for businesses, and it should not be monkeyed-around with, said Cal Tax's David Kline.

We'll be getting into specifics more when we visit some examples of big businesses that CTRA says haven't been reassessed after changing hands. But til then, here is Cal Tax's critique of CTRA's report:

· To imply that Proposition 13 has shifted the tax burden to residential property is an incredible sophistry. Every property owner knows that property taxes have not been shifted to their property. Their property is protected from such shifts by Proposition 13, and the tax cannot exceed 1 percent [plus bonds] of what they paid for it, plus a maximum 2 percent increase per year. Property owners would be paying vastly higher taxes if Proposition 13 did not exist.

· The report is full of rather meaningless data purporting to show that the gross value of residential property has increased since Proposition 13 passed in 1978, in different amounts in different counties. Duh! Anyone who has driven around California during the past 32 years [and has been subjected to major traffic jams] knows that substantial amounts of formerly non-improved property has been converted to residential property. There has been a great deal of construction of new homes for the roughly 15 million people who have been added to California's population since 1978, while many major businesses have closed or relocated out of state due to California's overall tax burden. These changes have nothing to do with the effectiveness of Proposition 13, but do affect the percentages of who is paying.

· Unfortunately, the data used by Mr. Goldberg – to show what we already know – is defective. The data is incomplete, based originally on unofficial estimates, and without any standard definitions or tests of its validity. We don't know what is included in the term "residential property," but we can surmise that it includes property purchased and sold by home speculators who drove up the prices of homes, leading to the real estate crash. It also includes income-producing residential property owned by businesses.

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